ActiveState’s Visual Perl has hit beta. I don’t know if many of you (mostly Rich, Mike and Melissa) have followed my pontifications about Micro$soft’s .NET for the past few months, but it’s starting to become reality. Also available will be Visual Python for the .NET framework (available in beta as an SDK now). These products are “drop-ins” for Visual Studio 7 and may well open PERL and Python to a much larger developer community that has traditionally used MS C++ and MS Visual Basic. Or, they could alienate the entire non-corporate developers community who will go out searching for “free” alternatives. It will be very interesting to see how this develops. Stay tuned.